| Formal division | Open division | |
|---|---|---|
| format | 12-round Swiss | 8-round Swiss |
| board size | 9×9 | 13×13 |
| rules | Chinese | Chinese |
| komi | 7½ | 7½ |
| time | 8 minutes absolute | 13 minutes absolute |
The first round started at 08:00 UTC for the Formal and 08:05 for the Open division.
As usual, the tournament was held in two divisions, Formal and Open, with more restrictive entry conditions for the Formal division.
Formal Division 9×9
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Open Division 13×13
|
We welcomed Fuego, a new player to these events. It is an open-source program by Markus Enzenberger, Martin Müller, and Anders Kierulf, with contributions from David Silver and Niu, Xiaozhen. It played as Fuego9.
Many Faces of Go intended to play, but its registration email was not received until next day.
I was generally impressed by the high level of play in this tournament. I am 2-kyu: sometimes in previous events I have been impressed by individual moves, and thought "that was clever, I would not have thought of that". But in this tournament, there were whole games in which the players appeared to have a better understanding of the game than I have.
I assume that many of the improvements in strength we are seeing in these events are due to programmers finding better ways of making the most of MC/UCT and RAVE. It is good that after two years, these improvements are showing no signs of slowing.
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| CrazyStone vs Fuego9 |
| The position after move 22, marked. |
In round 3, valkyria beat CrazyStone in a complicated and confusing game, in which many of the moves struck me as weird, without my actually being able to fault them SGF.
In round 6, valkyria played CrazyStone again, with the same colours as in
round 3 SGF. It would
be better if the draw program would reverse the colours when the same two programs
meet for the second time. The games were the same for the first seven moves. Again
valkria won.
Valkyria appeared to me to be playing
noticeably better than in previous events. Its author Magnus Persson told me
"I have cut out inefficences in the search, and fine tuned the playouts. No
big changes, but I feel a difference when I play it myself".
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| AyaMC vs Fuego9 |
| The position after move 68, marked. |
In round 8, valkyria lost its only game of the tournament, to MonteGNU. SGF. Valkyria started badly, allowing MonteGNU to make the "first to extend from a crosscut" shape with move 5.
In round 9, MonteGNU appeared to misread a ladder in its game against CrazyStone. SGF. But maybe it knew it had no way to win.
The round 11 game between CrazyStyone and valkyria (with the colours reversed this time) was exciting. SGF. Valkyria started a ko fight that it couldn't win, losing eight stones in the bottom left in the knowledge that its ko threat in the top right, if unanswered, was enough to win it the game.
The round 12 game between valkyria and Fuego9 was another competent, if eccentric, game. SGF. These players, by using MC, act as if they "understand" kos, sacrifices, and sekis; things that classical programs have never excelled at, even though they are explicitly "explained", i.e. hard-coded, for them.
AyaMC2 failed to appear in time for round 1. Its opponent StoneGrid won by default. AyaMC2's owner Hiroshi Yamashita had forgotten to run it; he got it running in time for round 2.
In round 4, GNU killed all HBotSVN's stones before both players passed.
They then disagreed about their status (in fact HBotSVN expressed no opinion,
which KGS currently treats as a claim that they are all alive). During the
clean-up, HBotSVN ran out of time.
HBotSVN was playing well below its potential. Jason House informed me
"It appears that I had too many versions of HouseBot running on my
server. There were two instances running with kgsGtp name=HBotSVN and
reconnect=t. They were competing with each other the whole tournament.
The additional cpu and memory contention led to significantly reduced
performance for the HouseBot login.". He later found that there was
also a third copy of it running from the same server.
In round 5, against FirstGoBot, HBotSVN played absurdly many stones on the 1-line. SGF This may have been caused by the contention between the two copies of it mentioned above, including the way they kept reconnecting and thereby removing the other from the server. You can see their (different, alternating) log-in messages in the game record.
In round 8, AyaMC2 achieved a win against StoneCrazy. SGF. Aya has always been a strong program, but it has become noticeably stronger in recent months. If it had appeared in time for round 1, and if it had beaten StoneGrid in that round, it might have won the division.